Jul 24 What The Hell Happened in East New York?

A companion to this long-form piece by writer Kevin Heldman, this mini-series doesn't really seek (as the piece itself does) to answer the question it poses in its title. Rather, it tries to understand Heldman, a complicated and eccentric and brilliant journalist who recently emerged from a long hiatus after the death of his wife, in 2004, at the impossible age of 38. At the outset of this series, he is obsessed by the question of why nobody knows or cares how bad things have got in East New York, the most dangerous neighbourhood in the city. The bulk of these four 15-minute episodes comprise meetings between Heldman and his editors at The Big Roundtable, during which they seek to understand his perspective on East New York, on how to write about it (he doesn't want to focus on 'characters'), and on his own life, the events of which he recounts with brutal honesty. It's an absorbing story-behind-the-story.